Form Energy has signed a 12GWh supply agreement in the US for its iron-air batteries with AI data centre infrastructure developer Crusoe.
Continuing a busy 2026 so far for the US multi-day energy storage startup, Form Energy announced earlier this week (24 March) that it had signed the strategic capacity agreement at CERAWeek 2026 in Houston, Texas.
The deal gives Crusoe secured volumes, pricing and delivery terms beginning in 2027. Crusoe describes itself as an energy-first data centre developer, focused on providing speed to power (i.e., getting energy resources online quickly) and prioritising low-carbon technologies.
Crusoe secures power alongside GPU computing capacity, which is important in a market landscape where concerns are riding high that data centre developments, particularly for power-hungry AI training campuses, are either going to be queuing up for the same congested grid connection queues as other resources or potentially leeching off energy capacity intended to serve other utility customers.
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The US government has recently responded to these concerns by encouraging ‘bring your own power’ (BYOP) or ‘bring your own capacity’ (BYOC) business models, and some data centres are being planned as off-grid facilities to get around grid connection and capacity limitations.
As regular Energy-Storage.news readers will be aware, Form Energy is commercialising a novel non-lithium battery technology that the company claims is based on abundant and cheap raw materials and capable of providing discharge durations of more than a hundred hours at full rated power.
The company emerged from stealth mode in 2021 and, in the past year, has begun operating its first pilot project with utility Great River Energy in Minnesota, US, signed agreements with other utilities in the US, and begun manufacturing its systems at a factory, Form 1, in West Virginia.
Crusoe deal follows 30GWh Google-Xcel deal
So far in 2026, its biggest announcement has been for another data centre-related project: Form Energy iron-air batteries will be used as part of a multi-technology energy supply agreement between Google and Xcel Energy, another utility based in Minnesota.
That project is, so far, the single biggest energy storage project announced in the world in terms of watt-hour capacity, at 30GWh, enabling 100-hour duration dispatch of its 300MW power output.
Just over a week ago, Form announced a partnership with renewables developer FuturEnergy Ireland for its first project outside the US, a 10MW/1,000MWh system expected to come online in 2029.
On the deal with Crusoe, Form Energy said the batteries will be manufactured at Form 1, aligning with US market and government-driven demand for domestically made solutions.
It is worth noting that although the deal, at 12GWh, is significant in scale, it can be seen as prospective until the first projects are underway. For instance, other non-lithium battery storage tech companies were seen to spend a few years racking up tentative multi-gigawatt-hour supply agreements with developers, where nothing was heard beyond the initial announcements.
Still, if Form Energy can pull it off, the Crusoe deal could set the startup on its way to becoming a major supplier to the burgeoning data centre sector.
Some in the industry have raised questions about the round-trip efficiency (RTE) of iron-air batteries, which is considerably lower than that of lithium-ion battery energy storage systems (BESS) or even flow batteries.
This was examined in a deep dive into the Google deal for ESN Premium earlier this month. The low RTE is something Form Energy representatives, including CEO and founder Mateo Jaramillo, have been upfront about since the company emerged from stealth mode.
The company’s concept is that the iron-air battery is designed to cover longer-duration lulls in renewable energy production that could last many hours or even days at a time, rather than the short-duration applications of up to about 1-hour or 10-hour requirements that lithium-ion more typically solves. Form Energy might argue that this, coupled with the claimed low cost of the iron-air batteries, makes the RTE less of an issue.
